Spotify to Go Public

We are about to find out how much Spotify might really be worth. The music streaming service with 60 million paying subscribers plans to go public on the New York Stock Exchange sometime in the first half of this year. A report in Bloomberg pegs the value of the company at around $15 billion, but others say it is worth closer to $20 billion.

Spotify, the world’s largest paid music-streaming service led by Swedish-born entrepreneur Daniel Ek, will go the direct listing route, which is considered an unconventional initial stock offering by analysts. Reuters says if successful Spotify would be the first major tech company to carry out a nontraditional direct listing.

The company, with over 100 million active users, has been successful in striking long-term licensing deals with major record labels in the past year yet it was recently hit with a $1.6 billion copyright infringement lawsuit by a music publisher. Variety reported Wixen Music Publishing filed the lawsuit in federal court in California in late December. Wixen owns the rights to songs from artists including Neil Young, Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks.

Spotify, founded in 2006, has its world headquarters in Stockholm and maintains its U.S. headquarters in New York City. The company announced last year it expects to move into new offices at the 4 World Trade Center in southern Manhattan by early 2018.